Penny Seeds

I’ve been doing a little experimenting with writing lately. There’s lots of sites online that will pay you for your writing, and everyone has a different opinion on them.  The most popular of those sites are Associated Content, Helium, HubPages, Xomba, and Suite101.

Basically these sites act as a ‘host’ for your articles. They have different payment methods, but the general idea is to drive traffic to the host site. When you do, you’ll get a bit of cash for it. I’m using associated content right now, but other people swear by different sites.

Suite101 is the only one that really requires an application - not everyone will be accepted to this site, and I’m not for sure why. As I can tell nobody seems to report them paying any better than HubPages or Helium. All of the sites except Associated content work on an ad revenue sharing scheme. The sites share google adsense revenue with you; usually via a 50/50 split.

Associated Content is the most interesting to me, even though many people claim they don’t pay nearly enough. You can submit an article in multiple ways to Associated-Content. They pay you for page views - not clicks. Everyone knows it’s much easier to get somebody to view a page with content; then click an ad. It’s still only a small amount of money - you’ll only get $1.50 - $2.00 per 1000 page views.

*Performance Payments

This option will only give you performance payments. The good thing about choosing this option is that you can publish immediately. A manual review takes about a week to occur. When you first join they will manually review three of your articles - if you pass for those you can publish for performance payments with no review. This method will only pay you for page views you bring in.

*Upfront Payment Review

This is the most interesting option that the other sites do not have. AC claims payments anywhere from $1.50 - $25, but usually it’s about $3- $8 if you’re lucky. Still, if you knock out some very short, and keyword rich articles in a couple minutes this could be a good deal for you. You will also still get performance payments for this option.

The best part about it is they allow re-print articles.  Even for upfront payment. The trick is that if you want upfront payment then you have to publish on AC first, and then distribute to other venues. If you just want to instantly publish it for performance it can already be on other sites. I’ve re-purposed several of my older articles like this one. Some of the other sites allow re-prints too so if you really wanted you could post to all of them I suppose.

*Calls For Content

Calls for content is a special program at AC. They post ‘assignments’ that conform to content they want on the site. You are either offered an upfront payment or simply performance pay. Many of these are for holidays that are coming up. I did a couple poems for Christmas, and Thanksgiving that got decent page views with no promotion from me.  You’ll have to be quick about it, because the good projects go fast. Simply claim your assignment, write it up, and submit it.

There’s several other options to decide how you want your work to be used. You can choose usage only which will allow you to delete your work at any time. This will also only get you performance payments for page views. Giving exclusive rights to AC will give you a slightly higher upfront payment, but I have yet to find this worthwhile. Non-exclusive will leave the article rights to you - but if you opt for upfront payment you can not remove your content from their site if you want to later.

Many people will swear to you that they make a full time living on sites like this doing no work, but I wouldn’t expect more than pizza money. I’ve made under $20 to date - though I do not have very many articles. Most of my payments have been from calls for content or upfront payment. To date I have about 1300 page views, and  - so no big money for me. All of the high ranking people have 200 articles, and up - so I’m thinking that’s the magic number.

You will make residual income like everyone claims, because I get a piddly few pageviews every month. It will take work if you want to make anything major with a scheme like this. However, if you already write for other places, and have re-print rights for your articles you might ‘re-purpose’ them here.

Tags: Associated Content, content production, HubPages, Make Money Writing Online, Online job opportunities, Xomba